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PuzzleSamen

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PuzzleSamen

Privacy

Privacy and your data

Puzzel Samen asks for as little as possible. You can play without an account: you enter a name, and it appears in the room you play in. There are no advertisements on the site, and nothing goes to other companies — unless you yourself say “yes” to the visitor statistics (see “Statistics” below). Puzzel Samen does count for itself how often each screen is viewed and left and how long it was open, and very roughly where a visit started (a search engine, another site, a room link or directly — never the link itself and never the search term), but only as a daily total: without cookies and without anything at all that points to you. To count how many visitors come back, the site remembers one date on your own device: the day of your previous visit. Here too only the rounded gap is sent (“first visit”, “within a week”), never the date itself and never anything that points to you. Sometimes we test whether a part of the site helps (for example the order of the buttons on the page about Swedish-style puzzles): your browser then remembers during one visit which side of that test you got, and only how often each side got further is counted — again without anything that points to you.

This is a translation for your convenience. The Dutch text at puzzelsamen.nl/privacy is binding.

Without an account

  • Your name in the room and the letters you fill in. They belong to the room and disappear with the room.
  • That you agreed to the terms of use: which version, in which language, when, from which device ID and from which IP address. We record this at the moment you check the box — when creating an account or before your first download. We keep it for as long as the agreement may matter; if you delete your account, the record is detached from you and only the date remains.
  • A device ID in your browser (localStorage), so that you get your own color back and can find your puzzle again. It is not stored in a cookie and does not go to anyone else. Without an account, which daily puzzles you completed is also linked to this device ID.
  • Chat messages disappear after half an hour; the last 15 per room remain for as long as the room exists. You can read along without an account, but not join in.
  • The app on your home screen. If you install Puzzel Samen as an app on your device, your browser keeps the page and the scripts on your device, so the app also opens without a connection. This contains no personal data, and it does not go to us or to anyone else. If you remove the app, or clear the data of this site, that copy is gone too.
  • Playing on without a connection. If your connection drops, the letters and chat messages you could not send yet stay on your own device (localStorage), together with the last known state of your room — so you can keep puzzling and nothing is lost. As soon as you are back online they go to the room, exactly as they would have with a connection, and disappear from your device again. While they are there, nobody else can reach them.
  • If you send us a message (the question after your first puzzle, or a report from the photo converter), we ask for your email address with it — otherwise we cannot reply. We only use it to answer that message, and the message stays with the administrator of the site, together with the language of the site on which you wrote it.
  • Carrying on alone. If you choose to finish a puzzle on your own, that puzzle and your letters are stored only on this device. They do not go to the room and not to us. If you stop (or clear the data of this site), they are gone.

With an account

  • Email address, name and (if you choose one) a profile photo. We use your email address to log you in and to send you a link; nobody else gets to see it, not even your friends.
  • We do not store your password. Our storage holds an irreversible derivative (scrypt with its own salt).
  • Your login is kept in a cookie that scripts cannot read (HttpOnly) and that lasts two months. Our storage holds only a hash of that token.
  • If you log in with Google or Apple, we store which provider it is, the fixed ID that provider issues for you and the email address it passed on. Nothing more: we get no access to your Google or Apple account and store none of its tokens. That link is included in the download of your data and disappears with your account. The provider itself does see that you log in to Puzzel Samen; its own privacy policy applies to that.
  • Friends: who you are friends with and which requests are open. If you invite someone by their email address, we keep that address until the invitation is taken up, and for a month at most.
  • Feedback you send, with your name and email address (so that we can reply) and the language of the site on which you wrote the message.
  • Your rating of a clue in a puzzle (a thumbs up or down, and any text you add): for which clue, in which puzzle and when. We use it to improve the clues. It is included in the download of your data. If you delete your account, your text and the link to your account are removed; your thumb then counts anonymously.
  • Which daily puzzles you completed (the calendar days), so that the monthly overview is right on every device. They are included in the download of your data and disappear with your account.
  • On which days you took part (the date only): if you correctly complete a word in an online room, that day keeps your streak going. These days are also included in the download of your data and disappear with your account. Without an account they are linked to your device ID.
  • Your time on the daily puzzle, if you solved it: the name you played under in that room and the number of seconds appear in the list “Fastest times today” on the home page. Only today's time is shown, only that name and those seconds — never your email address — and the entry disappears with your account.
  • The puzzles you saved (the stars in the puzzle picker), so that you can find them on every device. They are included in the download of your data and disappear with your account.
  • Your settings: whether you want to be findable by your name, your preferred color in the game and the language of the site on which you created your account. They are included in the download of your data and disappear with your account.
  • Whether your account is suspended (a moderation measure we only use in case of abuse). It is included in the download of your data and disappears with your account.
  • Notifications for the daily puzzle (if you turn them on): an address your browser issues per device, so that we can send you the daily reminder, and the language of the site on which you last turned the notification on. If you are logged in, it is linked to your account, included in the download of your data and disappears with your account. If you turn the notification off, the address is removed right away.

How long

Rooms clean up after themselves: empty or fully completed after a quarter of an hour, half filled in after two weeks. Chat messages after half an hour (except the last 15). Expired login sessions and used email links are thrown away. An account stays until you delete it yourself.

Your IP address

Every visitor to a website sends an IP address along; there is no way around that. Puzzel Samen uses it for one thing: counting how often something open to abuse is tried in quick succession — logging in, sending email, creating a room, publishing a puzzle. That counter exists only in the server's working memory, covers a window of a few minutes at most and then disappears by itself; when the server restarts, it starts empty. Your IP address does not go into the database, is not linked to your account, is not stored with your puzzles or your chat messages, and does not go to anyone else.

Supplying puzzles through an interface (API)

The administrator of the site can also have puzzles supplied by a script instead of by hand: one request prepares a puzzle and opens a room around it (POST /api/admin/publish). That door only opens with an admin token or a logged-in administrator account, and its descriptive schema is publicly available at /api/openapi.json — it contains only field names, no data.

What comes in that way is the puzzle itself and what you pass along about the room, such as the room name. No player data goes in or out: the request never gets back the solution of a puzzle, and never names, email addresses, chat messages or filled-in letters. If the administrator uses a service from someone else for this — for example an assistant that runs the script — that service only sees what is in that request: the puzzle and the room name.

How puzzle words fare

To improve the puzzles, we count anonymously how often a puzzle word prompts a hint, how often it is guessed wrongly and how often it comes out right without help. We only keep the word and those numbers — no name, no room, no device ID. That way we see which words are too hard, without keeping anything about you.

Statistics (Google Analytics)

Only if you say “yes” to it through the cookie banner does Google Analytics measure which pages are visited, with what kind of device and from roughly where, and which parts of the site are used — for example that a room was created, a hint was used or a chat message was sent. Never the content: no names, email addresses, room codes, chat texts or filled-in letters are sent. Google places cookies for the measurement (names starting with _ga) and also processes that data itself, outside this site. Without your choice, nothing is loaded.

With the same consent, Google Ads records whether a visit that came in through an advertisement leads to a new account (a conversion). Here too only that fact is sent — not who you are or which account it is — and Google uses Google cookies for it.

Sources and licenses

The puzzle words and clues come from Puzzel Samen's own word database. Part of the Dutch word list comes from Stichting OpenTaal (opentaal.org) and is used under the Revised BSD License. Factual data (such as capital cities) comes from Wikidata; that structured data is available under CC0. For how recognizable words are, we use the ranking from the word frequency list of FrequencyWords (Hermit Dave, based on OpenSubtitles), under CC BY-SA 3.0. For the English puzzles that are in preparation, we also use the Collaborative Word List (MIT license), the word list ENABLE (public domain), the British spelling variants from VarCon (Kevin Atkinson and Benjamin Titze, free license), the English word frequency list of FrequencyWords (CC BY-SA 4.0) and, only as raw material for our own clues, the word senses from Open English WordNet (CC BY 4.0, derived from Princeton WordNet). The clues themselves were written by Puzzel Samen, unless stated otherwise. The full license texts are in the project documentation.

What you can do yourself

In the account settings you can download everything we keep about you and have your account deleted. On deletion, your account, your profile photo, your friends and the puzzles you created are really removed; feedback messages remain without your name and email address, and a thumb on a clue counts anonymously, without your text. You can also set it so that nobody can find you by your name.

Is something not right, or would you like something arranged differently? Send a message through “Send feedback” in the account menu at the top right.

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